Articles

Hidden deep in an unexplored closet was a fashion relic from another era. It had been patiently waiting for me more than seventy years but it took an unexpected event to find it. We were invited to Swing Time, a 1940’s Hanger Party at the Scottsdale Airport in celebration of Veterans Day and to raise funds for the Thunderbird Field II Veterans Memorial and Dream Catchers. During World War II, the airfield had played a crucial role as the Army Air Corp training site for the Stearman PT-17 aircraft. Over 5,500 men were trained there for assignments in Europe and […]

In my ongoing efforts to discover and share interesting stories about the World War II era, I had rare encounter. I got to interview one of the mechanical engineers who worked at the “city behind the fence.” His daughter and I are members of the same professional women’s group in the Bay area and at a summer retreat, we made a surprising discovering. Her father had worked in one of the plants at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, just twenty-eight miles from where I grew up. In fact, he was assigned to the Y-12 plant where most of U-235, the fuel for […]

Christmas is tomorrow and I am enjoying a few quiet moments listening to my favorite holiday music. This is a welcome respite from my cooking frenzy that produced batches of nuts and bolts, bread pudding, sangria tarts, and my mother’s famous cranberry salad. Each song holds cherished memories of Christmas past and my mother’s southern culinary creations. My ears suddenly perk up when I hear Perry Como crooning, It’s Beginning to Look a Lot like Christmas. Was that one of parents’ favorite holiday tunes? I wondered what music defined Christmas for them and their generation during the war years. Many […]

Each month I create a preliminary schedule of potential blog topics, but there’s often an unexpected person, event or activity that grabs my attention that I write about instead. Such is the case today. While I was involved in a flurry of veteran activities in November, the person that inspired me the most was Shana Edwards. This petite, soft spoken high school student, the Arizona winner of the 2017 Voice of Democracy essay contest, was a speaker at the Veterans Day ceremony in Anthem, Arizona. Although I could barely see her from where I sat, her words rose above the […]